Reliable data protection solutions are becoming increasingly important as the usage of and reliance upon electronic data continue to increase. For example, data of numerous business processes may be entirely or substantially electronically stored. Exemplary processes including accounting systems, administrative (e.g., docketing, calendaring, recordkeeping, etc.) systems, email systems, etc. may generate significant amounts of electronic data. It is important to protect against loss of the generated electronic data.
Accordingly, high capacity data protection storage devices are becoming commonplace in numerous implementations, such as libraries, and backup and archive configurations, for example. It is desired for these arrangements to provide storage capabilities with minimal interrupts of the host system being protected. Increased speed, accessibility and reliability are additionally desired for providing short or long-term storage of digital data.
Some conventional arrangements utilize tape based systems to provide data protection solutions. First generation configurations deliver up to 100 GB of native data capacity on a single cartridge, while subsequent generations provide single-cartridge native data storage capacities of 1.6 TB, or more. Tape systems provide benefits of relatively simplistic design and reduced cost, but suffer from drawbacks of having relatively inflexible designs, and relatively slow speeds.
Other data protection solutions utilize disks for mass storage. Some disk storage systems provide increased flexibility with respect to configurability as well as provide increased operational speeds. Software may be provided in some disk archive designs to provide management of data storage within the disks. However, these disk archive management systems are not scalable. As the storage capacity of the disks is consumed during usage, it may be desired to add additional disks to accommodate additional storage requirements. However, at a certain point, the management system may be unable to effectively manage data storage operations due to the increased size and/or number of the disks being managed and/or the amount of data being stored. For example, existing resource limitations, in addition to physical storage space, include limitations of central processing units, memory, and/or input/output handling. These limitations impact the amount of data capable of being effectively stored or managed.
When maximum capacity is reached for a given system, it may be necessary for a software stack of a backup controller managing the system (e.g., controlling when backups are performed and where the data is stored) to stop backups, or move all stored data to another system wherein tracking data is updated for the data. These operations may result in a large amount of traffic between the plural systems and greatly degrade disk archive performance.
Accordingly, new apparatus and methods are desired to provide improved data protection solutions.